Unix-on-Intel players work on a common binary format

October 10th, 1997

Dear Debian users and developers,

Here's an announcement from the 86open project, a project to make
binary compatibility across all Unix variants on Intel architectures.
In short, it's an effort to support ELF LIBC6 executables on all of the
platforms, so that vendors can build a single application that runs on
all Intel Unix variants. As you can see from the announcement, this
project already has a substantial amount of commercial support.

I think this has much more of a chance to succeed where previous Unix
standardization efforts have fallen short. Rather than produce a paper
standard, the project will release a reference implementation that runs
on the various platforms. Because this will be free software, the cost
of implementing compatibility will be much lower than that of
implementing new software to run a paper standard.

The fact that commercial Unix vendors are turning to free software for
this solution is a real triumph for the free software movement, and one
I expect to see repeated. I'm happy to see the major Linux distributions
represented on the steering committee along with the largest commercial
Unix vendors, and I'm proud to represent Debian on this project.